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Any Kind Of Creative Activity Is Likely To Be Stressful. The More Anxiety, The More You Feel That You Are Headed In The Right Direction. Easiness, Relaxation, Comfort - These Are Not Conditions That Usually Accompany Serious Work.

-Joyce Carol Oates

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Any Kind Of Creative

Joyce Carol Oates

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Any Kind Of Creative Activity Is Likely To Be Stressful. The More Anxiety, The More You Feel That You Are Headed In The Right Direction. Easiness, Relaxation, Comfort - These Are Not Conditions That Usually Accompany Serious Work.

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At A Time When Politics Deals In Distortions And Half Truths, Truth Is To Be Found In The Liberal Arts. There's Something Afoot In This Country And You Are Very Much A Part Of It.

When I Wrote 'we Were The Mulvaneys,' I Was Just Old Enough To Look Back Upon My Own Family Life And The Lies Of Certain Individuals Close To Me, With The Detachment Of Time. I Wanted To Tell The Truth About Secrets: How Much Pain They Give, Yet How Much Relief, Even Happiness We May Feel When At Last The Motive For Secrecy Has Passed.

I Do What I Want To Do. It Was A Brash Statement Of(her)girlhood. Now She Was An Adult, The Boast Seemed Quaint. For Rarely Do You Know What You Want. Even After You've Done It You Can't Say Clearly If That Was What You'd Wanted Or Just Something That Happened To You, Like Weather.

The Danger Of Motherhood. You Relive Your Early Self, Through The Eyes Of Your Mother.

In A Family, What Isn't Spoken Is What You Listen For. But The Noise Of A Family Is To Drown It Out.

To Be Jewish Is To Be Specifically Identified With A History. And If You're Not Aware Of That When You're A Child, The Whole Tradition Is Lost.

Most People Think That A Widow Is Inhabiting Some Elegiac World Of - It's Like Mozart's 'requiem Mass.' You Know, It's Very Beautiful And Elevated Thoughts And Some Measure Of Dignity. I Didn't Have That Experience At All. I Had One Pratfall After Another.

Detroit, My 'great' Subject, Made Me The Person I Am, Consequently The Writer I Am - For Better Or Worse.

Look At The World And See What's There. It's Very Beautiful. It's A Very Exciting But In Some Ways Treacherous World, And All This Goes Into The Writing.

Novels Begin, Not On The Page, But In Meditation And Day-dreaming - In Thinking, Not Writing.

There Is No Past Anybody Can Get To, To Alter Things Or Even To Know What Those Things Were But There Is Definitely A Future, We Are Already In It.

[emily] Dickinson, Our Supreme Poet Of Inwardness.

The Historical Woodrow Wilson Suffered From Numerous Complaints Which We Might Today Label As Psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson Did Have A Stroke As A Relatively Young Man Of 39 And Seemed Always To Be Ill. He Was 'high-strung' - Intensely Neurotic - Yet A Charismatic Personality Nonetheless.

Primarily, 'black Girl/white Girl' Is The Story Of Two Very Different, Yet Somehow 'fated' Girls; For Genna, Her 'friendship' With Minette Is The Most Haunting Of Her Life, Though It Is One-sided And Ends In Tragedy.

The Worst Thing: To Give Yourself Away In Exchange For Not Enough Love.

Unrequited Love

There Was A Greek Philosopher Who Taught That, Of All Things, Not To Have Been Born Is The Sweetest State. But I Believe Sleep Is The Sweetest State. You're Dead, Yet Alive. There's No Sensation So Exquisite.

A Typical Biography Relying Upon Individuals' Notorious Memories And The Anecdotes They've Invented Contains A High Degree Of Fiction, Yet Is Considered 'nonfiction.'

There Is An Hour When You Realize: Here Is What You Have Been Given. More Than This, You Won't Receive. And What This Is, What Your Life Has Come To, Will Be Taken From You. In Time.

Near The Point Of Impact, Time Acelerates To The Speed Of Light.

The Punishment – To The Body, The Brain, The Spirit – A Man Must Endure To Become Even A Moderately Good Boxer Is Inconceivable To Most Of Us Whose Idea Of Personal Risk Is Largely Ego-related Or Emotional.

We Are All Regionalists In Our Origins, However 'universal' Our Themes And Characters, And Without Our Cherished Hometowns And Childhood Landscapes To Nourish Us, We Would Be Like Plants Set In Shallow Soil. Our Souls Must Take Root - Almost Literally.

It Feels Good, Honey, But It Isn't Love.

Ideas Brush Past Fleeting And Insubstantial As Moths. But I Let Them Go, I Don't Want Them. What I Want Is A Voice.

Getting The First Draft Finished Is Like Pushing A Peanut With Your Nose Across A Very Dirty Floor.

A Diverse And Lively Collection, The Highest Art Of The Interview.

Blood Transforms The Warm Bath Water And, In It, I See Weakly That This Was A Mistake. The Razor's Cut Is Not Deep, Nevertheless The Blood Rushes Out Happily In The Warm Water As If Kin To It, The Same Tender Substance. Rising A New Person Transformed With An Icy Sense Of Error I Go To The Sink And Turn On Cold Water Which Is Not Friendly To Blood. The Cut Is Deeper Than Imagined.

A Writer Who Has Published As Many Books As I Have Has Developed, Of Necessity, A Hide Like A Rhino's, While Inside There Dwells A Frail, Hopeful Butterfly Of A Spirit.

I Am More Or Less Reading All The Time.

Running! If There's Any Activity Happier, More Exhilarating, More Nourishing To The Imagination, I Can't Think What It Might Be. In Running The Mind Flies With The Body; The Mysterious Efflorescence Of Language Seems To Pulse In The Brain, In Rhythm With Our Feet And The Swinging Of Our Arms.

I Think Whenever We Think Of Our Hometowns, We Tend To Think Of Very Specific People: With Whom You Rode On The School Bus, Who Was Your Next Door Neighbor You Were Playing With, Who Your Girlfriend Was. It's Always Something Very Specific.

I Feel A Terrible Loss When I (eventually Must) Complete A Work Of Fiction.

The Domestic Lives We Live - Which May Be Accidental, Or Not Entirely Of Our Making - Help To Make Possible Our Writing Lives; Our Imaginations Are Freed, Or Stimulated, By The Very Prospect Of Companionship, Quiet, A Predictable And Consoling Routine.

It's A Taboo Subject. How The Dead Are Betrayed By The Living. We Who Are Living--we Who Have Survived--understand That Our Guilt Is What Links Us To The Dead. At All Times We Can Hear Them Calling To Us, A Growing Incredulity In Their Voices, You Will Not Forget Me -- Will You? How Can You Forget Me? I Have No One But You.

Probably Nothing Serious Or Worthwhile Can Be Accomplished Without One's Willingness To Be Alone For Sustained Periods Of Time, Which Is Not To Say That One Must Live Alone, Obsessively.

People Might Be Surprised To Know How Much I Throw Away. For Every Page I Publish, I Throw 10 Pages Away.

The Greatest Works Of Literature Seem To Embody Both "art" And "morality".

Critics Sometimes Appear To Be Addressing Themselves To Works Other Than Those I Remember Writing.

An Actress Wants To Be Seen. An Actress Wants To Be Loved. By Multitudes Of People, Not Just One Lone Man.

I Remember Once Asking Grandma About A Book She Was Reading, A Biography Of Abraham Lincoln, And How She Answered Me: This Was The First Conversation Of My Life That Concerned A Book, And 'the Life Of The Mind' - And Now, Such Subjects Have Become My Life.

Any Kind Of Creative Activity Is Likely To Be Stressful. The More Anxiety, The More You Feel That You Are Headed In The Right Direction. Easiness, Relaxation, Comfort - These Are Not Conditions That Usually Accompany Serious Work.

It's Always A Challenge To Discover The Most Effective First Sentence, And The Most Effective Final Sentence, In A Chapter For Instance, And In The Book As A Whole.

For Politics Is In Its Essence As Adams Had Said, The 'systematic Organization Of Hatred': Either You Were Organized Or You Were Not.

As A Farm Girl, Even When I Was Quite Young, I Had My 'farm Chores' - But I Had Time Also To Be Alone, To Explore The Fields, Woods And Creek Side. And To Read.

I Learned Long Ago That Being Lewis Carroll Was Infinitely More Exciting Than Being Alice.

It's Hard To Say How We Compare To Other People. We Each Inhabit Our Own Personalities. I Have Often Felt That I'm A Very Neutral Being And That I Have Almost No Personality. I'm Drawn To Writing Partly Because I'm Fascinated By The Mimetic Process.

We Are The Species That Clamors To Be Lied To.

For Obviously The Advantage For Most Writers Is That No One Sees Them. The Writer Is Invisible, Which Confers Power.

Insomniac Is An Impassioned Work-an Inspired Amalgam Of Academic And First-hand Research, Memoir, Analysis, And The Kind Of Obsessive Brooding We Associate With The Insomniac State. Much Here Is Fascinating, And Much Is Upsetting; Here Is A Cri De Coeur From A Lifetime Insomniac That Is Sure To Appeal To The Vast Army Of Fellow Insomniacs The World Over.

Better To Be Despised, Then, Than To Be Ignored; Or Damned With Condescending Praise.

After My Husband Died, I Could Not Write Much - I Could Not Concentrate. I Was Too Exhausted Most Of The Time Even To Contemplate Writing. But I Did Take Notes - Not For Fiction, But For A Journal, Or Diary, Of This Terrible Time. I Did Not Think That I Would Ever Survive This Interlude.

The Denial Of Language Is A Suicidal One And We Pay For It With Our Own Lives.

Every Scar In My Face Is Worth It.

A Lot Of Widows Feel That They Have Betrayed Their Spouse By Continuing To Live. It's Deranged Thinking. I Know That, But That Doesn't Stop You Feeling It.

Henry David Thoreau Is Very Independent-minded, Very Iconoclastic, And Had Quite A Corrosive Sense Of Humor. I Think That I Probably Have Grown Up To Have A Thoreauvian Perspective On Many Things. Though In Other Ways I Live A Life He Would Not Have Approved Of. He Believed To Simplify, Simplify, Simplify. Make Your Life Very Clear And Plain And Meditative And Not Confused. Sometimes My Life, In Fact, Is Confused.

One Of The Qualities Of Writing That Is Not Much Stressed Is Its Problem-solving Aspect, Having To Do With The Presentation Of Material: How To Structure It, What Sort Of Sentences (direct, Elliptical, Simple Or Compound, Syntactically Elaborate), What Tone (in Art, "tone" Is Everything), Pacing. Paragraphing Is A Way Of Dramatization, As The Look Of A Poem On A Page Is Dramatic; Where To Break Lines, Where To End Sentences.

Prose-it Might Be Speculated-is Discourse; Poetry Ellipsis. Prose Is Spoken Aloud; Poetry Overheard.

You Wake Up One Morning, Those Years Are Gone. There's A Comfort In This Fact Perhaps. I Want To Think That There Must Be Comfort In All Facts We Can't Alter.

The Appeal Of Writing Is Primarily The Investigation Of Mystery.

How Lovely This World Is, Really: One Simply Has To Look.

I'm Sure All That You've Heard Is Just The Usual Gossip, Invented To Injure Feelings Rather Than Illuminate Truth.

Memory Blurs, That's The Point. If Memory Didn't Blur You Wouldn't Have The Fool's Courage To Do Things Again, Again, Again, That Tear You Apart.

Though I Am Never Exactly "blocked" I Do Have Difficult Periods. I Am Led By A Fascination With Material - The Challenge Of Presenting It In An Original And Engaging Way. I Have No Problem Imagining Stories, Characters, Distinctive Settings & Themes - But The Difficulty Is Choosing A Voice & A Language In Which To Present It.

Yes, 'black Girl/white Girl' Might Be Described As A 'coming-of-age' Novel, At Least For The Survivor Genna. It Is Also Intended As A Comment On Race Relations In America More Generally: We Are 'roommates' With One Another, But How Well Do We Know One Another?

It's Impossible To Read A Distinctive Stylist Like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - And Many More - Without Wanting To Write, However Entirely Different One's Writing Will Be.

The Ideal Art, The Noblest Of Art: Working With The Complexities Of Life, Refusing To Simplify, To "overcome" Doubt.

The Suicide Does Not Play The Game, Does Not Observe The Rules. He Leaves The Party Too Soon, And Leaves The Other Guests Painfully Uncomfortable.

What Does It Mean To Be Born? After We Die, Will It Be The Same Thing As It Was Before We Were Born? Or A Different Kind Of Nothingness? Because There Might Be Knowledge Then. Memory.

You Can't Deny Eros. Eros Wills Trike, Like Lightning. Our Human Defenses Are Frail, Ludicrous. Like Plasterboard Houses In A Hurricane. Your Triumph Is In Perfect Submission. And The God Of Eros Will Flow Through You, As Lawrence Says, In The 'perfect Obliteration Of Blood Consciousness.

Strange: How When A Light Is Extinguished, It's Immediately As If It Has Never Been. Darkness Fills In Again, Complete.

I Am What Would Be Called A 'mainstream Feminist,' Not A Radical Feminist.

If My Favorite, Most Comfortable Place Is By Our Fireplace In Cold Weather, Expedient Places Are On An Airplane, In A Waiting Room Or Even Waiting In Line; Frequently These Days, While On The Phone Having Been 'put On Hold.'

To Be Knocked Out Doesn't Mean What It Seems. A Boxer Does Not Have To Get Up.

The - The Sort Of Thing That I Want To Do Is To Strike A Resonant Chord Of Universality In Other People, Which Is Best Done By Fiction.

Perhaps The Inevitable Tragedy Of Our Complex Civilization Is That We Must Be Specialists In Our Fields - And Our Fields Have Become Increasingly Difficult, So That Communication Is Nearly Impossible.

And I’m Drawn To Failure. I Often Write About It, And I’m Sympathetic With It, I Think, Because I Feel I’m Contending With It Constantly In My Own Life.

The Institution Of Marriage Is Just Formalizing An Emotion, An Attempt To Make It Seem Permanent. The Emotion Will Last Or It Won't Last; Nothing Can Guarantee It.

Beauty Is A Question Of Optics. All Sight Is Illusion.

A Mouth Of No Distinction But Well Practiced, Before I Entered My Teens, In Irony. For What Is Irony But The Repository Of Hurt? And What Is Hurt But The Repository Of Hope?

Childhood Is The Province Of The Imagination And When I Immerse Myself In It, I Re-create It As It Was, As It Could Have Been, As I Wanted - And Didn't Want - It To Be.

Early Publication Can Be A Dubious Blessing: We All Know Writers Who Would Give Anything Not To Have Published Their First Book, And Go About Trying To Buy Up All Existing Copies.

To Choose The Ideal Voice For A Character Is To Give A Character An Ardent And Vivid Life, To Allow Him Or Her To Speak, Rather Than Speaking For Them, In An Older Style Of Omniscient Narration.

While There Are 'women Writers' There Are Not, And Have Never Been, 'men Writers.' This Is An Empty Category, A Class Without Specimens; For The Noun 'writer' - The Very Verb 'writing' - Always Implies Masculinity.

I Have Beliefs, Of Course, Like Everyone-but I Don't Always Believe In Them.

I Can Entertain The Proposition That Life Is A Metaphor For Boxing--for One Of Those Bouts That Go On And On, Round Following Round, Jabs, Missed Punches, Clinches, Nothing Determined, Again The Bell And Again And You And Your Opponent So Evenly Matched It's Impossible Not To See That Your Opponent Is You.... Life Is Like Boxing In Many Unsettling Respects. But Boxing Is Only Like Boxing.

I Rarely Write In My Own Voice Except In Book Reviews And Memoirs; Otherwise, I Am Writing In Mediated Voices, Modulated In Terms Of The Characters Whom The Voices Express.

Ambitious, Absorbing, And Poignantly Moving.

The Written Word, Obviously, Is Very Inward, And When We're Reading, We're Thinking. It's A Sort Of Spiritual, Meditative Activity. When We're Looking At Visual Objects, I Think Our Eyes Are Obviously Directed Outward, So There's Not As Much Reflective Time. And It's The Reflectiveness And The Spiritual Inwardness About Reading That Appeals To Me.

I Could Eat Your Heart & Asshole You'd Never Know It.

The Heavenly Light You Admire Is Fossil-light, It's The Unfathomably Distant Past You Gaze Into, Stars Long Extinct

...[i Am] Utterly Entranced, At Times, With The Mere Fact That There Are Other People, And That They Experience Themselves As The Primary Center Of Consciousness Just As I Do. That Fact Alone...well, That Fact Alone Is Staggering.

Nothing Comes Of So Many Things, If You Have Patience.

Having Patience

It's Where We Go, And What We Do When We Get There, That Tells Us Who We Really Are.

Shakespeare Would Seem To Have Been A Person For Whom The Human Voice/personality In All Its Splendid Idiosyncrasy Was Absolutely Enthralling.

My Belief Is That Art Should Not Be Comforting; For Comfort, We Have Mass Entertainment And One Another. Art Should Provoke, Disturb, Arouse Our Emotions, Expand Our Sympathies In Directions We May Not Anticipate And May Not Even Wish.

...failure Is A Human Condition, Not Victory Over Odds; For Each Hellen Keller Who Triumphs, There Are Tens Of Millions Who Fail, Mute And Deaf And Insensate As Vegetables Tossed Upon A Vast Garbage Pile To Rot.

I Never Really Knew I Wanted To 'be' A Writer, But I Was Always Writing From A Very Young Age. It Became More Conscious As An Ideal When I Was In My Twenties.

Yet I Will Make You All Love Me And I Will Punish Myself To Spite Your Love.

No, The Thing Is, We All Love Storytelling, And As A Writer You Get To Tell Stories All The Time.

Of Course, Both [oscar] Wilde & [vladimir] Nabokov Believe In Many Things, And These Things Emerge In Their Writing Clearly - For Wilde, The Folly Of Humankind And The (romantic) Grandeur Of The Heroic, Lone Individual (not Unlike Wilde Himself); For Nabokov, The Possibility Of A Kind Of Transcendence Through A Great, Prevailing, Superior Sort Of Love (especially In Ada, The Most Self-congratulatory Of Novels.)

One Of Life's Minor Satisfactions Is Forgetting.

Love Is An Indescribable Sensation - Perhaps A Conviction, A Sense Of Certitude.

I Think What Distresses Me Most In My Life Is That I Have So Many Ideas I Consider Exciting Ideas That I Will Never Live To Execute Because It Takes Me So Long To Execute.

Whoever's Reading This, If Anyone Is Reading It: Does It Matter That Our Old Selves Are Lost To Us As Surely As The Past Is Lost, Or Is It Enough To Know Yes We Lived Then, And We Are Living Now, And The Connection Must Be There? Like A River Hundreds Of Miles Long Exists Both At Its Source And At Its Mouth, Simultaneously?

What Is A Family, After All, Except Memories? Haphazard And Precious As The Contents Of A Catch-all Drawer In The Kitchen.

I Was Brought Up To Be Sympathetic Toward Others.

Cherie, Keep Walking. Shut Your Eyes. We Are Headed For The Bridge. We Are Going To Cross It.

I Could Never Take The Idea Of Religion Very Seriously.

I Turn Down Invitations To Do Things For Money. I Have Almost No Interest In Making Money. Actually, I've Acquired A Fair Amount Of Money That I Will Never Live To Spend. So Earning Money, In A Way, Depresses Me, Because I Feel It's Just Piling Up.

I Don't Teach Literature From My Perspective As 'joyce Carol Oates.' I Try To Teach Fiction From The Perspective Of Each Writer. If I'm Teaching A Story By Hemingway, My Endeavor Is To Present The Story That Hemingway Wrote In Its Fullest Realization.

Loneliness Is Like Starvation: You Don't Realize How Hungry You Are Until You Begin To Eat.

I Believe That Any Form Of Art Is A Species Of Exploration And Transgression. ... Art By Its Nature Is A Transgressive Act, And Artists Must Accept Being Punished For It. The More Original And Unsettling Their Art, The More Devastating The Punishment.

Only In Love Is There Trust - Even The Possibility Of Trust.

I Always Tell My Students The Same Thing. And That's To Live Life, And To Read Very Voraciously Without Any Definite Program. To Travel, To Meet People, To Talk To People, To Listen Very Carefully, And Not Interrupt, But Listen To Their Own Grandparents Speak Of Their Families.

The Folly Of War Is That It Can Have No Natural End Except In The Extinction An Entire People.

. . . There Is A Wish In The Heart Of Mankind To Be Distracted And Confused. Truth Is But One Attraction, And Not Always The Most Powerful.

I Don't Feel I Write Fast. I Write In Longhand And Do So Much Revision. On The Page, It's So Old-fashioned. I Could Write A Whole Novel On Scrap Paper, Scribbles And Things. I Keep Looking At It And Something Develops. For Me, Using A Word Processor Would Mean Staring At A Screen For Too Many Hours.

Prose-it Might Be Speculated-is Discourse; Poetry Ellipsis. Prose Is Spoken Aloud; Poetry Overheard. The One Is Presumably Articulate And Social, A Shared Language, The Voice Of "communication"; The Other Is Private, Allusive, Teasing, Sly, Idiosyncratic As The Spider's Delicate Web, A Kind Of Witchcraft Unfathomable To Ordinary Minds.

Don't Try To Anticipate An Ideal Reader - Or Any Reader. He/she Might Exist - But Is Reading Someone Else.

Characters Begin As Voices, Then Gain Presence By Being Viewed In Others' Eyes. Characters Define One Another In Dramatic Contexts. It Is Often Very Exciting, When Characters Meet - Out Of Their Encounters, Unanticipated Stories Can Spring.

We Are Linked By Blood, And Blood Is Memory Without Language.

You Cultivate The Subconscious By Meditation, By Sitting In Silence And By Not Trying To Control Your Thoughts. Then Go Someplace Where You Haven't Been Before, Or Go For A Walk, A Run, And Look For Signs Of Grace-an Epiphany, Something That Comes To You.

I've Always Been Interested In Writing About People, Including Young Children Who Are Not Able To Speak For Themselves. As In My Novel 'black Water,' I Provide A Voice For Someone Who Has Died And Can't Speak For Herself.

The Worst Cynicism: A Belief In Luck.

Acting Is The Loneliest Profession I Know.

This Was Before Voice Mail, Recorded Phone Messages You Can't Escape. Life Was Easier Then. You Just Didn't Pick Up The Phone.

For What Are The Words With Which To Summarize A Lifetime, So Much Crowded Confused Happiness Terminated By Such Stark Slow-motion Pain?

Betrayal Is The Deepest Wound. Betrayal Is What Remains Of Love, When Love Has Gone.

If A Book I've Committed Myself To Review Turns Out To Be 'disappointing' I Make An Effort To Present It Objectively To The Reader, Including A Good Number Of Excerpts From The Text, So That The Reader Might Form His Or Her Own Opinion Independent Of My Own.

Writing Is The Most Solitary Of Arts.

One Writes To Memorialize, And To Bring To Life Again That Which Has Been Lost.

Of The Widow's Countless Death-duties There Is Really Just One That Matters: On The First Anniversary Of Her Husband's Death The Widow Should Think I Kept Myself Alive.

I Don't Know What Marriages Are Like In General, But There Are Many Things Which I Don't Talk About With My Husband. We Discuss Practical Problems, But I Wouldn't Sit Down With Him And Talk About The Distant Past. It's Somewhat In Contrast To Other Americans, Who Feel That They Have To Confess Things, But I'm Really Not Like That.

To The West, The Pacific Ocean, Which Revulses Me, For Its Vastness Cannot Be Fitted Into Any Box.

I Don't Think That Writer's Block Exists Really. I Think That When You're Trying To Do Something Prematurely, It Just Won't Come. Certain Subjects Just Need Time, As I've Learned Over And Over Again. You've Got To Wait Before You Write About Them.

I Haven't The Faintest Idea What My Royalties Are. I Haven't The Faintest Idea How Many Copies Of Books Sold, Or How Many Books That I've Written. I Could Look These Things Up; I Have No Interest In Them. I Don't Know How Much Money I Have. There Are A Lot Of Things I Just Don't Care About.

Love Commingled With Hate Is More Powerful Than Love. Or Hate.

Art Does The Same Things Dreams Do. We Have A Hunger For Dreams And Art Fulfills That Hunger. So Much Of Real Life Is A Disappointment. That's Why We Have Art.

A Daydreamer Is Prepared For Most Things.

I've Always Been So Interested In Personal History. I'm Very Fascinated By My Parents' And My Grandparents' Generations. I Seem To Think That They Had A Resilience And An Integrity That May Be Somewhat Deficient In My Own Generation, And In Subsequent Generations As Well, Because America Has Been Rather Easy To Live In Since The Depression.

I Don't Read For Amusement, I Read For Enlightenment. I Do A Lot Of Reviewing, So I Have A Steady Assignment Of Reading. I'm Also A Judge For The Anisfield-wolf Book Awards, Which Gives Awards To Literature And Nonfiction.

'a Fair Maiden' Existed In Notes And Sketches For Perhaps A Year. When I Traveled, I Would Take Along With Me My Folder Of Notes - 'ideas For Stories.' Eventually, I Began To Write It And Wrote It Fairly Swiftly - In Perhaps Two Months Of Fairly Intense Writing And Rewriting. Most Of My Time Writing Is Really Re-writing.

People Have Libraries At Home, They Have Bookshelves, They Have Cds. And They Sort Of Try, People Try To Bring Great Artists Into Their Lives, Into Their Physical Houses And Sort Of Live With Portions Of Them. But They're Not Really Deeply Engaging With Them.

For The First Time Driving That Day I Could Feel The Motion Of The Earth. The Earth Rushing Through The Emptiness Of Space. Spinning On Its Axis But They Say You Don't Feel It, You Can't Experience It. But To Feel It Is To Be Scared And Happy At Once And To Know That Nothing Matters But That You Do What You Want To Do And What You Do You Are. And I Knew I Was Moving Into The Future. There Is Not Past Anybody Can Get To, To Alter Things Or Ever To Know What Those Things Were But There Is Definitely A Future, We Are Already In It.

Vividly Imagined, Beautifully Written, At Times Almost Unbearably Suspenseful-the Stories In Kristiana Kahakauwila's Debut Collection, This Is Paradise, Are Boldly Inventive In Their Exploration Of The Tenuous Nature Of Human Relations. These Are Poignant Stories Of 'paradise'-hawai'i-with All That 'paradise' Entails Of The Transience Of Sensuous Beauty.

I Am Always Reading Or Thinking About Reading.

On The Elusive Gift Of Blending Austerity Of Craft With Elasticity Of Allure.

My Students Often Say, "my Roommate Read This Story And Really Liked It", And It's Hard To Convince Them That There Are Things Wrong With It. I Say, "well, People Who Love You Want You To Be Happy. But I'm Your Professor And I'm Supposed To Be Teaching You Something."

The Mysteries Of The Female Sex! We Men Can Never Hope To Fathom Your Depths, But Only Try Not To Drown In Them.

My Writing Is Often A Way Of 'bearing Witness' For Others Who Lack The Education And The Opportunity To Tell Their Own Stories, So I Hope That My Writing Won't Be Affected Too Much By My Personal Life.

When I Was Very Little, Four Or Five, I Did Comic Strip Drawings, So My First Novel Had No Words. I Couldn't Write And Thought Adult Handwriting Was A Mysterious Scribble. When I Was 14, My Grandmother Gave Me A Typewriter And I Started Writing In A Different Way.

I Am Inclined To Think That As I Grow Older I Will Come To Be Infatuated With The Art Of Revision, And There May Come A Time When I Will Dread Giving Up A Novel At All.

Who Is To Blame For This Most Recent Of Sports Disgraces In America? The Culture That Flings Young Athletes Like Tyson Up Out Of Obscurity, Makes Millionaires Of Them And Watches Them Self-destruct?

I Love Insult, It's Always Honest.

To Be True To Life, A Novel Must Have An Ending That Is Inevitable Given The Specific Personalities Of The Characters Involved. The Novelist Must Not Impose An Ending Upon Them.

This Is My Life Now. Absurd, But Unpredictable. Not Absurd Because Unpredictable But Unpredictable Because Absurd. If I Have Lost The Meaning Of My Life, I Might Still Find Small Treasured Things Among The Spilled And Pilfered Trash.

The Television Screen, So Unlike The Movie Screen, Sharply Reduced Human Beings, Revealed Them As Small, Trivial, Flat, In Two Banal Dimensions, Drained Of Color. Wasn't There Something Reassuring About It! -- That Human Beings Were In Fact Merely Images Of A Kind Registered In One Another's Eyes And Brains, Phenomena Composed Of Microscopic Flickering Dots Like Atoms. They Were Atoms -- Nothing More. A Quick Switch Of The Dial And They Disappeared And Who Could Lament The Loss?

One Of The Large Consolations For Experiencing Anything Unpleasant Is The Knowledge That One Can Communicate It.

One Man's Insanity Is Another Man's Genius; Someday The World Will Recognize The Genius In My Insanity.

The First Sentence Cant Be Written Until The Final Sentence Is Written.

Maybe, Love Is Always Forgiveness, To A Degree.

Why Should I Want What's Good For Me?' Beatrice Asked Him, Smiling. 'is That What You Want For Yourself - Only What's Good For You?

Where There Must Be A Choice, A Girl Will Choose Daddy. Even If You Are Mommy, You Concede That This Must Be So: You Remember When You Were A Girl, Too.

Fame's Carapace Does Not Allow For Easy Breathing.

When I'm Really Involved Or Getting Towards The End Of A Novel, I Can Write For Up To Ten Hours A Day. At Those Times, It's As Though I'm Writing A Letter To Someone I'm Desperately In Love With.

If I'm Writing, I'll Say Something Metaphorical Or Approximate, Whereas Scientists Are Very Precise.

If Shakespeare's Great Plays Are Variants Of Stories, Even Novels, You Can See How Each Character Is Telling His Story From His Perspective; Each Is Vying With The Others For Dominance, But In The End, In Tragedy, Most Of These Voices Will Die, To Be Replaced By The Yet More Vigorous Voice Of A Younger Generation.

'we Were The Mulvaneys' Is Perhaps The Novel Closest To My Heart. I Think Of It As A Valentine To A Passing Way Of American Life, And To My Own Particular Child - And Girlhood In Upstate New York. Everyone In The Novel Is Enormously Close To Me, Including Marianne's Cat, Muffin, Who Was In Fact My Own Cat.

It's One Of Those Secrets That's Embarrassing To Acknowledge, But We Do Love Our Students.

And What Is 'art'? - A Firestorm Rushing Through Time, Arising From No Visible Source And Conforming To No Principles Of Logic Or Causality.

As A Teacher At Princeton, I'm Surrounded By People Who Work Hard So I Just Make Good Use Of My Time. And I Don't Really Think Of It As Work - Writing A Novel, In One Sense, Is A Problem-solving Exercise.

America Is A Very Religious Nation. Not A Mono-religious Nation Because There Are Many Different Strands Of Belief, But There's Something About This Nation That Inspires People, Or Perhaps Draws People, Who Are Strongly Idealistic.

Not To Be Alone. To Be Spared The Possibility Of Knowing Oneself, In Aloneness.

Knowing Oneself

I Wrote A Novel Called "blonde," Which Is About Norma Jean Baker, Who Becomes Marilyn Monroe, Which I Called A Fictitious Biography. That Uses The Material As If It Were Myth - That Marilyn Monroe Is Like This Mythical Figure In Our Culture.

What Is Memory But The Repository Of Things Doomed To Be Forgotten, So You Must Have History. You Must Have Labor To Invent History. Being Faithful To All That Happens To You Of Significance, Recording Days, Dates, Events, Names, Sights Not Relying Merely Upon Memory Which Fades Like A Polaroid Print Where You See The Memory Fading Before Your Eyes Like Time Itself Retreating.

Each Time I Undertake To Reread Virginia Woolf, I Am Somewhat Baffled By The Signature Breathlessness And Relentlessly "poetic" Tone, The Shimmering Impressionism, So Very Different From The Vivid, Precise, Magisterial (and Often Very Funny) Prose Of Her Contemporary James Joyce.

My Role Models Were Childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, The Brontes.

Evil Isn't A Cosmological Riddle, Only Just Selfish Human Behavior.

Stories Come To Us As Wraiths Requiring Precise Embodiments.

Art Is The Highest Expression Of The Human Spirit.

Truths Are The Last Thing You Learn About Your Family. By The Time You Learn, You're No Longer Their Child.

Only When Men Are Connected To Large, Universal Goals Are They Really Happy-and One Result Of Their Happiness Is A Rush Of Creative Activity.

The Great Menace To The Life Of An Industry Is Industrial Self-complacency.

I Come From People Who Did Not Go To College. They Didn't Even Finish High School. People Who One Might Call Ordinary Americans Who Are Very Hardworking.

I Think It's Very Important For Writers And Artists Generally To Be Witnesses To The World, And To Be Transparent. To Let Other People Speak... To Travel... To Experience The World. And Memorialize It.

For Madness Must Be Punished In A World In Which Mere Sanity Is Prized. The Revenge Of The Ordinary Upon The Gifted.

If You Explore Beneath Shyness Or Party Chit-chat, You Can Sometimes Turn A Dull Exchange Into An Intriguing One. I've Found This To Be Particularly True In The Case Of Professors Or Intellectuals, Who Are Full Of Fascinating Information, But Need Encouragement Before They'll Divulge It.

Why Is Humanism Not The Preeminent Belief Of Humankind?

Later, Her First Intense, Serious Love Affair, Yes Then She'd Lost Something More Tangible, If Undefinable: Her Heart? Her Independence? Her Control Of, Definition Of, Self? That First True Loss, The Furious Bafflement Of It. And Never Again Quite So Assured, Confident.

Because The Meaning Of A Story Does Not Lie On Its Surface, Visible And Self-defining, Does Not Mean That Meaning Does Not Exist. Indeed, The Ambiguity Of Meaning, Its Inner Private Quality, May Well Be Part Of The Writer's Vision.

To Write A Novel Is To Embark On A Quest That Is Very Romantic. People Have Visions, And The Next Step Is To Execute Them. That's A Very Romantic Project. Like Edvard Munch's Strange Dreamlike Canvases Where People Are Stylized, Like 'the Scream.' Munch Must Have Had That Vision In A Dream, He Never Saw It.

My Life Is A Very Interior And Solitary Life. I Tend Not To Care That Much About External Things.

Even As A Young Child, I Was A Lover Of Books And Of The Spaces In Which, As Indeed In A Sacred Temple, Books Might Safely Reside.

Keeing Busy" Is The Remedy For All The Ills In America. It's Also The Means By Which The Creative Impulse Is Destroyed.

Writing Is A Consequence Of Having Been 'haunted' By Material. Why This Is, No One Knows.

We Come Away From The Tragedies Of [william] Shakespeare With A Profound Sense Of Having Encountered Reality In Its Most Pristine Form - Yet The Art-work Is Elaborately Artificial, The Very Genre Of Tragedy In Poetry An Anti-naturalist Perspective.

There Is Nothing "ordinary" About Reality.

When People Say There Is Too Much Violence In My Books, What They Are Saying Is There Is Too Much Reality In Life.

You're An Insomniac, You Tell Yourself: There Are Profound Truths Revealed Only To The Insomniac By Night Like Those Phosphorescent Minerals Veined And Glimmering In The Dark But Coarse And Ordinary Otherwise; You Have To Examine Such Minerals In The Absence Of Light To Discover Their Beauty, You Tell Yourself.

Much In Our Lives Is Chance.

The Brain Is A Muscle Of Busy Hills, The Struggle Of Unthought Things With Things Eternally Thought.

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